Twelve Colonies

Earlier today I saw Bad Astronomy’s post about a Twelve Colonies map created by one of the writers and the science advisor for the new Battlestar Galactica series. I’m a big fan and always wondered how all the different colonies mentioned in the show related to one another.

I forwarded the link to a good friend (who I introduced to the series) and mentioned how this would make an excellent Universe Sandbox simulation (since there was so much data about sizes and distances). She emailed back with the encouragement to make and post it today so I spent the rest of the day creating a Universe Sandbox simulation of the Twelve Colonies of Kobol.

Open the Twelve Colonies simulation on your computer

Download & Install Universe Sandbox (it’s free and includes a 60 minute trial of all the premium features)
You may want to run through the short tutorial to get a feel for how to navigate in the simulator.

More info

And a final screenshot that shows how the stars are all orbiting each other:

The stars Alpha and Beta are orbiting each other on the left and Gamma and Delta are on the right. The other larger spiral is the Ragnar planet that orbits the barycenter of Gamma and Delta. To create this shot I deleted all the planets (save Ragnar), increased the time step, and lengthened the trails. This is showing the extent of the entire simulation as shown in the center of the original star map.

Yes. While there’s no way to avoid this issue all together in a gravity simulator, we’re investigating adding adaptive time steps and better user feedback in Universe Sandbox 3, this should go a long way to helping people avoid this issue.